


Catch

by justanotheranonymouswriter



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23908462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotheranonymouswriter/pseuds/justanotheranonymouswriter
Summary: Donna wants more. An exploration of her own experiences of how her work and relationships affect her. As always a good dose of Darvey angst thrown in.
Relationships: Donna Paulsen & Harvey Specter, Donna Paulsen/Harvey Specter
Kudos: 7





	Catch

Donna knows herself well, and so she doesn't like to spend too much time alone in the quiet of her apartment.

It's not that she's avoiding self-reflection exactly; she couldn't if she wanted to, the knack for looking through people like they're made of glass is not something she can just turn on and off, and she hides from herself about as well as Harvey hides from her. Oh, she has her blind spots, parts of her own puzzle that she can't see, and they spring up out of nowhere from time to time. But mostly, she knows herself. And she knows her worth.

She knows her heart, her soul, she knows what the something is in _there's something about her_. It's not arrogance and it's not ego. It's just a quiet clarity. She is good. She is good with her people and good in her heart.

Donna is also good at her job. Very good. She knows it and Harvey knows it. He says he can't be him without her and it's not hyperbole. Every day he takes on the world, but only because she is there to firm up the ground under him, to show him north, to call him home when he loses his way. To the world she's an assistant. But Harvey and Donna both know in their unspoken, sideways glancing, secret language kind of way, that she's isn't his helper as much as his partner. She's good, and she knows it - not in arrogance, but just in the way the sun knows the sunrise - it's born from everything she is.

Donna knows her own heart better than she knows everyone around her. She knows herself better than she knows her parents, her sister, even better than she knows Harvey.

Donna often feels six feet tall.

But.

The problem is that six feet doesn't mean much when you go to work every day with giant killers.

It's difficult to be a person so sure of who she is, being sure she is built for towers and giants and for shattering ceilings, and yet finding herself walking the floors of a firm where she's seen by too many as the secretary who couldn't quite cut it as an actress and who has a weird knack for knowing what people are thinking. She feels the weight of the back room gossip, of the asides, of the 'did you hear' and the 'I bet they still sleep together' and the 'she wouldn't have that much sway if she wasn't fucking him every now and then'. She keeps trying to redraw her lines in sharper contrast, fighting against the firm that keeps trying to make a shadow out of her. People keep losing sight of her, though.

It's unfair, but then, she's not the first woman to bump into the complications of office friendships that look and feel like they're more than that. She's far from the first to find herself in the shadow of a giant killer. And Harvey casts a wide shadow.

She's a mirror image of Harvey, drawn white against his black, colour against his grey. He throws confidence into the world like nothing has or will ever break him, then goes home at night to retreat into the quiet certainty that one day, people will see through his smile and his suit, through to the battle he's wearied under, and see his cracks and dust, and leave him.

Donna, though, feels her seams pull together tighter every day, feels herself touch somewhere into the void and come back all light and certainty, sees people clearly, sees herself, knows she is here and loved and, human, yes, but _good_ , but walks through hallways all day where she is a ghost with a quick turn of phrase and a knack for saying the right thing.

He is all surface, hiding ocean, and she is all depth, made shallow because nobody is really looking.

It strains on her, a little more, every day, until she feels it like she's weighted down when she wakes in the morning. Her shoulders tense under the burden of being less than she is made to be. She works at contentment, she works at 'the firm isn't everything' and 'nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission'.

The problem is, she knows internal contentment is bullshit when external ignorance is laid upon you like a cloak, and the firm is everything because for better or worse Harvey _is_ the firm. And so slowly, slowly, a deep dissatisfaction settles under her skin.

Her dissatisfaction stays a blind spot for a long time. It sits unseen through the DA's office, through failed auditions that she slowly forgets to keep chasing down, through quitting because Harvey quit and moving because Harvey moved, and through a few years of pushing more towards Harvey's goals than her own. But eventually the cracks start to show. They flash up and they work out dangerously, make her take risks, make her shred documents and talk her way into file rooms, make her avoid prison by the skin of her teeth and hand in resignation letters that he tears up and hands back to her. It makes her talk Harvey out of handing himself in because deep down she knows it's him and not Mike she needs, because he lets her glimpse the _could_ and _almost_ of her days.

They look like moments where she's lost her way but they aren't. They're the apparitions of a could be giant killer trapped in walls built too small for her. And when the walls are too small, everything you do knocks one down even if you're trying not to.

Donna is not reckless; yet she draws like a moth to the flame to the edge of insanity, flirting with the grey Harvey loves to play in, though she's not built for that, not really. She has a moral clarity he doesn't (that most of them don't) and she edges away from the cliff he runs to. She never goes over the edge, always yanks him back, but she'd be lying if she didn't understand the pull he feels in his bones. He's a gambler, and she isn't, but the world she lives in calls her to roll the dice.

There are times when flirting with the edge of insanity drags her and Harvey so goddamn close to the cliff together, edging right to the line they drew years ago and then spent countless days since blurring into oblivion, and they have to cling to each other to keep from falling over. And every now and then they find themselves working in the firm at 3am, fighting against prison or investigation or ethics panels, and the pressure pushes them both to to eye each other over files and boxes, and she sees the tension under his muscles and knows he's looking at the same restless itch in her. So there's a silent moment where their eyes meet, blown dark and wide, and they think _fuck it_ and collide in the bathroom moments later, pull each other into the stalls and lock the door clumsily so they can lose themselves in each other for a couple of rushed moments. Donna is never sure if it's her pushing him to the cliff, or him pulling her to it, or both of them all at once.

It's exhilarating and gut wrenching and fucking terrifying, all kisses and contact and pressing their length against each other in the only moments where the fight ever seems to slow down for them at all. Donna finds the buttons on his jacket and loosens them so she can smooth her hands around his back and read the tension and lust in his shoulders. Harvey hitches her legs around his waist and kisses her like he's falling in love with her and she can feel the weight of him in her soul. She always has his tie loose and her hands on his belt buckle before one of them realises they're too close to the edge, they're about to fall, and pulls them both back with a staggered _wait_ and they both catch their breath against each other's mouths. She wants it to feel like love but mostly it feels like panic and release and then panic again.

She flirts with the cliff and there's part of her that loves it because she feels for a split second like a giant killer casting a huge shadow, but she also hates it because it makes her feel like the glances and asides have merit, even though her and Harvey are not some realised infantile fantasy of a boss fucking his secretary. There's something much deeper and visceral going on between them but they've hidden it away. People see them, though, see them and how they look at each other and how they sometimes emerge from a bathroom separately a few minutes after each other, smoothing their hair and straightening their clothes, and so they keep talking.

When Donna pulls Harvey to her she feels alive and seen, but when others guess at them and their … whatever it is … they have, they make her invisible and it's a Catch-22 with her work on one side and Harvey on the other and she can't bear to relinquish either. So she turns to him and away from him like a cracked record and all the time she desperately wants something _beyond_ what she's been allowed to be, knowing the closer she draws to him the further the beyond gets from her. Always, she is almost with Harvey. Always, she is almost a giant killer.

Donna is almost. She is now and not yet, arrived but not quite, waiting at a door she's knocked at too long and maybe it's time to just break in. She's tried, before. Donna hears 'no' too much.

'No', and 'I need this', and 'you have to', and 'there's no other way', and she knows she shouldn't resent how much the people around her need her need her so much she can't get past her own almost.

It happens slow, her getting sick of being almost, building alongside that nagging dissatisfaction; the weariness, the exhaustion of being who she is to the surprise of people who should know better. Harvey and Louis and Mike all raise their eyebrows at her long past when her ability to dig their intentions out of them should be surprising. Hearing _how in the hell did you know that?_ is something she develops a tired expectancy for and _I know everything because I'm Donna_ becomes sarcastic and brittle after too many years worn under her lips.

And then, one day, quite unexpectedly, the slow decay of her armour and patience works out dangerously once again. It doesn't work out in flirting with the cliff edge, in risking everything with her work or in pulling Harvey against her in a dark room and kissing him until he forgets where he is. Instead it works out after she finds herself waiting with himin a moment of hung silence, waiting for his help, his advice, waiting for him to work a miracle and open that fucking door, the door that almost hides behind, and she can feel the desperation on her face, feel the _I need this_ in her eyes.

But instead, he says, "take the money."

He's vibrating with sympathy, he wants it so badly for her, and he can't give it to her and she can see it kills him to say it, but it's still a freight train. She's tried to be careful with this; tried not to get carried away, tried to tick all he boxes and do her due diligence and get everything right. And once again, cruel and inhuman and fucking unfair, she hears a it makes her dangerous. It makes her enter the grey, flirt with the gambler she doesn't really think she is.

It makes her say "I don't want the money," and it's not something she realised she was so desperate to say out loud until she says it and like it's a cry for help and a declaration of war all at once.

And then.

_I_

_want_

_something_

_more_

Neither of them know what that means but it catches them both off guard, shakes them down to their foundations. Harvey softens, and he's scared, but he asks her what she means. There's a question in his eyes he's asked once before - _is this about you_ but really _is this about us._

Maybe it is. There's a part of Donna, she thinks, that won't ever be able to look at Harvey without asking that question. He is just like her something more. He is her forever almost, her forever maybe, her not-yet-but-one-day-if-he-ever-really-sees-her. And yes, there's a low pull towards him always there, sleeping beneath the surface, but this isn't that right now.

This isn't about almost-Harvey, she thinks. It's about almost-her, about her shadow, about what more she can do to finally just be _seen_.

She is the sun, fighting for the dawn.

She feels tears down her cheeks, and she's Donna so she allows it - she's not him, drawn in grey and hiding from the world. She's her colour, pushing away from shadow, and she can see him shrug uncomfortably but it's not really because of the tears, it's because of the shift. She sees him realise what she has, that the cliff edge they dance across isn't the problem, it's the ground back from the edge, the ground where Donna lives and yanks him back to, the ground that was always been his solid foundation and true north. It's not crumbling, but it's moving, and maybe it's not all just for him anymore.

She walks away before he can say anything, she doesn't wait for his answer or his blessing and it might be the first time she's ever done that when it's this important and when she's asking for something instead of telling him something about reality that he's missed, and it feels like gravity changes shape.

She's trying, finally, to find space for herself outside the walls, to banish the shadow, to kill a giant.

—

It will be days before the phrase _COO_ drops out of Harvey's mouth and she feels like maybe this is it and maybe her outside will finally fit her inside.

It will be months before Mike shatters her world with 'tell him how you feel' and she throws herself over the cliff for real.

It will be years before Harvey finds himself jumping after her.

And in between these moments, she learns to kill giants.

_end_

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Mai (@suits4ever) who made an incredibly generous donation to assist with Aussie bush fire relief. She wanted to read a fic that looked at Donna's feelings about her own professional worth outside the firm. This was a fun challenge, as we don't often see much from Donna's POV.
> 
> Reviews are gratefully received!


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